Drug Ads

It never fails. Whenever I'm watching TV with my dad and a commercial comes on for an anti-depressant, it eventually gets to the list of side-effects, which usually includes something along the lines of increased risk of suicide, at which point my dad invariably says, "Why would anyone want to take that?"

Every single time, I bite my tongue, because I've taken a few classes in Psychology that have all said that anti-depressants are usually a last resort in the treatment of depression because of those side-effects.

In theory, if you're being treated for depression, you're seeing a psychiatrist who knows whether or not you need an anti-depressant, and will discuss those medication options with you, and will know which one will be the most likely to help you. So... why do these pills need commercials during the ten o'clock news?

The idea is that people will go into the doctor's office and say, "Hey, I saw this ad on TV, and y'know... it sounds like I could use it... What do you think?" And the doctor will say, "Well, what are your symptoms?" and from there will be smart enough to figure out if the person needs the drug or not. Clever little way for these drugs to boost their sales. And who knows? It could help someone realize they have something that can be treated, instead of suffering because they think it's "normal."

But the sad truth is that some doctors will just say, "Okay," and hand you a prescription just because you saw a clever little ad on TV. And some of these commercials don't even say what they're supposed to treat; they just show happy people walking through a field. Who doesn't want to happily walk through a field?

Once upon a time, there was some legislation that cartoon characters couldn't be used to advertise cigarettes, because they appealed too much to children, and cigarettes are harmful. Think about that, and then listen to that list of side-effects again and ask yourself why there's an anti-depressant advertising with a cartoony character who bears striking resemblance to a Shel Silverstein character. (I'm referring to Zoloft and to The Missing Piece, and I would gladly insert some pictures if Blogger would only cooperate and let me place them where I want to instead of assuming I want them at the top of the post.)

Of course, the chances that your doctor, pharmacist, and insurance company will all accept a minor being prescribed Zoloft without any amount of fuss are fairly slim. The same is probably true when a little girl sees an advertisement for birth control, featuring an animated ballerina made of flowers. But it still doesn't sit quite right with me.

Reading Response: "Practices of Looking" Chapter Nine

So this chapter was all about "scientific" images. I found it disturbing on all sorts of levels. Oh, where should I start? How about starting with this troubling and very prevalent idea of "normalcy."

"Normal" came up a lot in this chapter. There were photographs and MRIs to categorize "normal" people, as opposed to the diseased, criminal, and crazy. Now scientists are trying to sort out what is and is not "normal" with DNA. The book talked a lot about how this idea of "normal" has been (and will probably continue to be) used to rationalize prejudice and discrimination--a fancy "scientific" way of white Europeans shouting "I'm better than you are" at the rest of the world.

I think the problem with "normal" goes beyond discrimination--though goodness knows that's a big enough problem on its own.

I don't think I've ever claimed to be normal. For years now, I've proudly proclaimed that I'm crazy and celebrated my abnormality. Because of that, once in a while someone scolds me for having such a "low" opinion of myself. But most of the time, I take "crazy" as a compliment. Why?

Because there is no such thing as NORMAL! It doesn't exist! It can't exist. There's no "normal" and "abnormal." There's just difference! The whole world is overflowing with this great big beautiful rainbow of difference, and we keep blinding ourselves to it because we all just want to be this ambiguous, imaginary thing called "normal," and we can't! "Normal" is just another way of trying to get everyone to be the same. Difference is good! "Abnormality" can be a wonderful thing. Think about the great figures in history, the real difference-makers, the inspirational leaders, the role models you look up to, and ask yourself if you would ever call them "normal." Do you think Abraham Lincoln was normal? How about Albert Einstein or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr? Leonardo da Vinci? Pablo Picasso? Heck no they weren't normal!

Yet "normal," which occasionally takes the pseudonym "average," is up on this pedestal that we're all supposed to aspire to. We're supposed to be normal, and if we're not normal, we're weird, and then we're outcasts. So I try to celebrate how "crazy" I am, and then I turn around and find myself taking three prescription drugs in attempt to live a "normal" life. In fairness, there really isn't anything wrong with wanting a little help if you go weeks at a time without being able to sleep more than a few hours a night, and if you're in so much pain once a month that you can barely crawl off the floor. But when it's so ingrained in culture that you're supposed to be "normal," the fact that you are so extremely not "normal" can be devastating when you're supposed to be in the prime of your life and the doctor hands you that third prescription.

I apologize, Imaginary Reader. This has turned into more of a personal rant than a discussion of the chapter, but it is my genuine reaction. I'll discuss more of the intellectual stuff in other posts.

The Rhetoric of Headphones

This really ought to be connected with my Rhetoric of People-Watching, because that's where it comes from.

When you're walking along wearing headphones, you're sending two messages: One, "I don't want to hear you," and two, "I don't want you to hear what I'm listening to." They combine to a message of, "I'm in my own little zone over here, so don't bother me." Intentional? Not always. But that's the message I get.

So here is my question. If a headphones-wearer doesn't want you to hear what they're listening to, why do they have the volume so high that you can hear their music from ten feet away?

When I hear someone's headphone-music from ten feet away, this is the message I get: "I don't want to interact with you or anyone else in the world, and I'm pretending to try not to disturb anyone when I really don't care if I do, and I don't mind if I lose my hearing." Those poor, battered little eardrums. Personally, I'm somewhat paranoid about abusing my eardrums. My eyesight is bad enough that I don't want to damage my sense of hearing any more than I have to.

Headphones in general give off a vibe of disconnectedness with the physical world, which extends to things like cell phones and Bluetooth earpieces. They all say that, yeah, sure, their user is here right now, but that is so not the priority. The person using the headphones, cell phone, or Bluetooth earpiece is typically far less aware of their surroundings than they would be if they weren't using those things, which is something not-so-well-intentioned people can take advantage of. My sister once referred to the earbuds that come with iPods as those "mug-me white wires sticking out of your ears." And it's true--headphones in general are a sort of invitation for muggers, and the more noticeable they are, the louder the invitation.

Probably not the message the wearer intends to send, is it?

We're in the Same Situation, but It's Really Completely Different

Getting back to context, which isn't exactly a term for class but has so much affect on rhetoric that I think it ought to be, I have another example of it at work.

Weeks ago now, I was walking on the trail by my apartment during what was basically the trail's rush-hour. That was entirely unintentional on my part. It's just that when I wanted to clear my head and take advantage of the nice weather happened to be the same time when lots of people were out on the trail, many of them heading home from work.

One such person was a Hispanic guy who looked like he was about my age and happened to start talking to me. It turned out that he was an immigrant who had only been in the country for a year, so his English was fairly broken. Since the only Spanish I know, I learned from Sesame Street ("Tu me gustas, that means I like you!"), there was a substantial language barrier, but we still somehow managed to have a fairly decent conversation.

Now, here's where context comes into play: before we started talking, I assumed he was a college student enjoying the nice weather, just like me. Likewise, he assumed that I was in high school and on my way home, just like him. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get across that language barrier that I was just out for a stroll, and that I needed to turn around to get back to my apartment before dark.

If he had just been out for a stroll, he probably would have caught on much quicker, but human nature seems to be that we assume everyone in a certain situation is there for the same reasons and in the same way that we are.

Come to think of it, I had a similar encounter in the elevator at the beginning of last school year. There was no language barrier this time, but a guy assumed that since I lived in the same dorm as he did, and since I lived on an Honors floor just like he did, I had to be a Freshman just like he was. It took me a bit to figure it out, because he was talking about "that class we have to take." As a Freshman, I probably would have caught on right away that he was referring to Honors Freshman Seminar. Just one year later, I had no idea.

Interface

No, Imaginary Reader, "interface" is not like "Neutraface" and Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." So stop singing it, please. ...Oh wait, that's me singing. My apologies.

I don't think interface was ever actually a term in our reading, but it has come up in class enough times. As far as I understand it, an interface is a sort of expected set-up for a viewer to use or navigate information. This understanding comes, in part, from one time when I heard the professor tell one of my classmates that he was folding his brochure wrong, and she said, "That's not the proper interface!" And now that I've typed that out, it doesn't quite make the connection it makes in my head, so you'll just have to trust me on this one, Imaginary Reader.

So, assuming I understand interface properly, it's an expected sort of system that helps you get around. Let's get back to my road signs, shall we? When you see a red octagon with white letters, you probably assume you should stop. (Unless you're from Europe, where road signs are different than they are here in the US, and then I don't know what your stop sign looks like.) If you see a little white rectangle with a red border on the side of the road, your first thought might be that it's a No Parking sign. If it's a bigger white rectangle with a black border, it's probably a Speed Limit sign, and you ignore it unless you're a goody-two-shoes like me, in which case everyone passes you while you mutter at them for being too good for the speed limit.

This predictable system of roadsigns, the same all across America, is one big interface. From Alabama to Alaska, if you're on the road and you see an orange sign to the right, you know there's construction. If a stoplight turns red, you stop. (Or, you go really fast and hope you don't cause an accident.) If you've been raised with it, some of it seems almost intuitive, but really you've just been indoctrinated with it. This is the interface you expect, and if you woke up one day and all the roadsigns across the country had suddenly switched around, so that red borders were speed limits and black borders were No Parking, and orange signs were landmarks and brown signs were construction, then there would be a lot of confused drivers on the road.

Even slight variations in this interface can throw people off--or at least, I presume that's what happened in the case I saw while walking on the trail. I passed a sign alerting the trail's users that there was an intersection ahead--a three-way intersection, that is. Apparently, someone was so accustomed to four-way intersections that they painted the fourth direction onto the sign, because it just wasn't acceptable to have a sideways-T where there should have been a plus sign.

Of course, it was probably just someone being funny, but I still wish I'd taken a picture.

The Rhetoric of People-Watching

My dear Imaginary Reader, do you like series? I sincerely hope you do, because they give me a little structure to think of things to say, and in case you didn't know it, we're currently in the middle of a series of things that occurred to me while walking on the trail by my apartment.

The thing about taking a stroll on a trail is that you're almost never the only person on that trail. You see other people, and they see you. And since you're just taking a walk just to clear your mind and retrieve your brain, your thoughts are wandering quite a bit, so you start thinking about the people you see and making assumptions about them.

Today, for example, I saw the same woman three times. She looked to be about middle-aged, a little on the plump side, dressed all in black. The first time I saw her, I was wondering if she felt as self-conscious about using her umbrella as I did, because it was on that fine line between drizzling and not. The second time I saw her, she was in a hurry and she looked upset. I started hypothesizing all these random ideas about why she was rushing back the way she came. Maybe she'd just lost track of time, or maybe she'd gotten a phone call and something was wrong, or maybe...

Anyway, I didn't really want my walk to end, so I took an odd loop on my way back, and just as I was finishing up my loop, who do I see coming my way? That same lady. And for her to have gotten to that loop, she had to have turned around again, so we smiled at each other with the sort of mutual realization that, yes, we were both just sort of wandering the trail at random. And it occurred to me that she's very pretty when she smiles.

My point in telling this little story is that I do a lot of people-watching. Maybe it comes from being a writer, but I'm always supposing random circumstances and reasonings for the people around me. I think it's because of that that I always assume everyone who sees me in public is assuming all sorts of things about me, so I get paranoid when I'm walking and suddenly remember something or change my mind and turn around and walk the other way for no real visible reason. I'm just certain that the other people in the store, or wherever I am, must think there's something wrong with me.

And I guess that's the Gaze the book was talking about, isn't it?

Font

We spent a week or two in class discussing font. To be honest, the main thing I remember is that the professor showed us a parody of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face," in which some nerdy-types were singing about a font called Neutraface. ("You'll read my, you'll read my, you can read my neutraface! Even if it's bold-italic...") It was hilarious, and it still gets stuck in my head sometimes.

But that's not the real focus of the font unit. See, here's my issue with font: it's supposed to be a rhetorical choice. I've heard several times now that you shouldn't just go with the default, but have a reason for using the font you use.

Well, you know what? I like Times New Roman. It's a nice, standard, serif font that's very easy to read. It's what I and many other people are used to. No, it's not always the best choice... but for most of the writing I do, it does just fine. So what if it happens to be the default? It's the default for a reason.

But I like to keep an open mind, so let's play with some fonts and see what sort of rhetorical effect they have.

Let's start with Arial. It's sans-serif, which means you read it a little slower. (In case you don't know, Imaginary Reader, serifs are the cute little lines that hang out on the tops and bottoms of letters in some fonts. Sans-serif is when those lines aren't there, like in this font. Sans-serif: I. Serif: I. See the difference?)

I've never been fond of Arial. Yes, it's a standard font, just like Times New Roman, but it doesn't have quite the elegance. Sans-serif feels very informal, and isn't usually a good idea if you've got a lot of reading to do. This is already hurting my eyes, but that's probably because I'm being a bit hyper-critical.

This is Courier. We have serifs again. We also look like we're on a typewriter. (Why am I using the royal "we"?) Depending on my mood, I do like Courier sometimes, but it definitely has its time and place. It feels like it belongs on an official government document. I wouldn't want to use this for a paper on the Muppets. (And yes, I've written multiple papers on the Muppets.)

Here's Georgia. Blogger, by the way, uses the short names for fonts, so while I'm fairly certain Georgia has a longer name, I don't know what it is. Now, I don't really have any issue with Georgia. It's strikingly similar to Times. If I want something this similar to Times, why not just use Times? There must be some difference between the two. Let's see if we can find it.

Georgia: The red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.

Times: The red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.

Alright, so Georgia is a bit bigger than Times, although that Times looks way smaller than the Times at the top of the post.

This one is Lucida Grande. It's serifed, but not quite as serifed as Times. Note how that apostrophe is not curved back there. In Times, apostrophes and quotation marks are curved. I'm not really sure what advantage Lucida Grande has over Times. A lot of fonts look an awful lot alike, don't they?

Now we have Trebuchet, which was my font on Instant Messenger for a while. Oddly enough, I tend to use sans-serif fonts on IM, and I do a lot of IM reading. So I have no real issue with Trebuchet, but again, sans-serif seems less formal to me. (That may be why I use it for IM, where I mostly engage in casual conversation.) I probably wouldn't want to use Trebuchet to write a formal proposal.

Verdana, I think I also used for IM at some point. It's sans-serif, nothing too fancy... So, again, fine in a casual setting, but I probably wouldn't use it for a memo to the CEO.

Webdings. Enough said. (Translation: Webdings. Enough said.)

Bein' Green

So I was going for a walk on the trail by my apartment, and I started thinking about how nice and lush and green everything was, and how that was so soothing and calming. Naturally, that got me thinking about our color unit, and how I read that green is supposed to inspire trust, and I wanted to do my presentation on green as used on bank websites, only to find that green was hardly used at all on bank websites, so I used blue instead.

In class, we talked about different colors "meaning" different things, or at least that's what a lot of the research was about. Green makes you trust, and blue makes you focus, and dark blue is empowering, and so on and so forth. But really, no matter what the color is, how it makes you feel depends on context.

Alright, so on my walk, green was wonderful. It made me nice and calm, and helped me clear my head, which is exactly why I took a walk to begin with. And it's true that I like the color green; it's one of my three favorites, thanks almost entirely to Kermit the Frog. (Have I mentioned that I'm obsessed with the Muppets?)

But that doesn't mean green is always good. In fact, green can be quite bad. Not fifteen minutes before my walk on which I found green so wonderful, I had this conversation with my roommate in which green was bad.

Me: You know, this tea is getting kind of gross...

Her: Oh! I'd completely forgot about it. How is it getting gross?

Me: It's turning green.

Her: EWWW!

On the bright side, she finally got rid of that cup of tea that had been sitting on the coffee table for days, but I really could've gone without seeing that green. It was about the same shade as some moss, which I enjoy seeing on the side of trees, but this was a much different context. Funny how much context can change.

It's Everywhere!

I realized I've been talking about documents without really saying what a document is. Now, I know, dear Imaginary Reader, that a document seems like a fairly obvious thing, but trust me, it's more than that.

You see, everything is a document. I mean, sure, a memo is a document. But so is a book, a website, a poster, a bumper sticker, a decorative pillow, a napkin... everything! Because everything uses and is and draws from rhetoric. Try as you might, you just can't escape it.

For example, I watched The Incredibles the other night. Perfectly innocent, a nice little family film about (in the composer's words--what? I watched the bonus features, too) hugs and explosions. No rhetoric to deal with there, right?

WRONG!

I just read a hugely left-wing, rather biased article bashing The Incredibles, and then got into an intellectual discussion (well, alright, a rant) with a friend about how the article was skewed, how it mis-represented the movie (interpellation is one thing, but this person was completely changing certain plot points), and what the movie is really about. And all of that is rhetoric. You can't escape!

So from there, my friend and I start talking about stereotypes in children's films, and how Disney girls tend to be unhealthily thin while the guys tend to be ridiculously buff, so we grow up thinking we'll find our prince or princess who can't actually physically exist the way Disney sets us up to look for them. See? More rhetoric.

Or, for example, when I call home to complain to Mom that I'm still sick, and she tells me to think positive, that's rhetoric. The note that I put on the door of my apartment that says "Don't forget your phone!" is rhetoric. Every single communication and interaction you ever have with any part of the world is rhetoric. So, no, there's no escaping it. You can choose not to think about it all the time, though... which I would actually recommend, if you intend to stay remotely sane.

The Clock

So here's a thought I've often had on my way to class.

Across most of the ISU campus, you can hear at least one clock chime the hour. It's like the clock is yelling out, "Hey, you! It's 2:00." (That's interpellation. Hey, YOU!) And everyone reacts a different way.

If you're rushing off to class, that clock can sound very condescending. It's saying, "You. Are. Late." And you panic and hurry a little faster.

If you're in class and you hear that clock, and class happens to be very boring, that clock is probably taunting you. "It's only two o'clock. You have another hour to listen to Professor Monotone drone on, and on, and on..." (Fortunately, I don't have any Professor Monotones this semester. Actually, I've never had a Professor Monotone at 2:00. 11:00, however...)

If you're in an interesting class and you hear the clock, all the clock is really doing is clearing its throat (metaphorically speaking) so that you look at it and do a double take. "What? 2:00, already? Dang..." Except, of course, that you don't actually look at the clock that's making the noise, because you can't see it from the classroom.

That same clock, making the same noise, can mean all sorts of different things. In addition to what I've got listed above, that clock can chime sweet freedom ("Yes! I'm done with class for the day!"), it can be a soothing little background noise while you take a breather on the quad, it can be a ticking time-bomb ("Only one hour left to finish this paper..."), and a bunch of other things I'm just not thinking of right now. If it's two in the morning, it's the exact same sound, but now you're listening to it while you like awake in bed, and it's saying "Yes, you are still awake, you little insomniac," or you're listening to it while you try to finish the assignment you procrastinated on and it's saying "You're running out of time, and now you'll be getting less than x-hours of sleep tonight, and you've still got three pages to go!"

All these different reactions can come from the exact same person, reacting to the exact same sound. And that is why there is more to rhetoric than what the producer of any given anything intends. All that clock wants to say is "It's 2:00!"

A Load of CRAP: Proximity

Well, Imaginary Reader, I started all the other CRAP principles with some sort of joke, or at least something amusing, so you're probably expecting something amusing for Proximity, too, aren't you? Sorry. I can't think of anything. We'll have to jump straight into the boring stuff.

Proximity is how close together things are. Things that have a lot to do with each other should be pretty close together. Things that don't have much to do with each other shouldn't be so close together. Again, it's very simple, but this is another one of those things that people tend to screw up.

The reason people screw up Proximity is that they think white space is bad. You know, white space--all the areas in a document where there is no text or image. Here's a news bulletin, folks: white space is good! Give your readers some breathing room. Don't crowd things in. If everything is crowded together, you can't tell what goes with what.

Proximity is the nifty little organizer you get from Ikea or The Container Store to help you organize your room. When your room is nice and neat and organized, you're bound to have some white space. That means your floor is clear and you can get from your door to your bed and closet without tripping and spraining your neck. It also means that you can vacuum, which means you can get rid of some of that dust and stop sneezing all the time. It's the same with document design--white space is a good thing.

You want your headings to be nice and close to the body text under them, but not so close that you can't find the heading. You want a little more space between the body text and the next heading that comes under it. That makes white space, which makes breathing room.

So there you have it. Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. I really think these things should be intuitive, but hey, sometimes we forget. That's why we've got a CRAP-y acronym to help us remember.

A Load of CRAP: Alignment

This is left-alignment.

This is right-alignment.

This is center-alignment.

This is justified, which means it stretches or squishes so that every single line is exactly the same length.

But that isn't actually the kind of alignment we're talking about. I mean, it's part of it, but not all of it.

What alignment means is that all the parts of your document should line up nice and neat. You shouldn't

jump all over the place

at random

and make it

really

hard

to

read.

That's what poetry is for.

Alignment is your mom telling you to clean up your room, or your teacher telling you to organize your desk/locker/binder. If your document is a mess, people will just look at it and cringe. They won't want to read it, because they'll have trouble finding their way around. You know how when your room is a pigsty, you trip over everything and can't get to your bed? That's poor document alignment.

I'm not saying you need to line everything up perfectly in cute little grids. I'm not even saying you have to "justify" your text to make pretty little columns like they have in the newspaper. (In fact, I'd prefer if you didn't. It's harder to read that way.) I'm just saying it should be tidy enough that I know what's what. And getting back to repetition, the sub-headings should align with other sub-headings on the page, headings should align with other headings, and so on. See? They tie together so nicely.

A Load of CRAP: Repetition

The second CRAP principle is repetition. The second CRAP principle is repetition. The second CRAP principle is repetition. The second CRAP principle is repetition.

No, not that kind of repetition!

This is one of those things where they could have given it a better name, but they went with the acronym instead. They say repetition, but they really mean consistency. What it means is that all your headings should look the same as all your other headings, all your sub-headings should look the same as all your other sub-headings, and all your body text should look the same as all your other body text.

It means that once you establish a certain style for your document, you should stick with that style. Otherwise, your document looks like it's got multiple personalities. That's not a good thing for a document. It should be nice and cohesive, so that people can look at it and figure out what's going on.

Repetition does not mean that everything in your document should be exactly the same. That would contradict Contrast. (See part of my issue with the CRAP principles is that teachers like to present them in ways that make it seem like they contradict each other.) Titles should still look different from headings, headings should look different from sub-headings, and sub-headings should look different from body text.

Getting back to that road sign analogy, what repetition means is that stop signs should look like stop signs, speed limits should look like speed limits, and road names should look like road names. If someone put up a sign that said "Grand Avenue" but looked like a Yield sign, no one would know what to do with it. If someone wrote "STOP" on a sign that looked like a "No Parking" sign, nobody would stop.

So, we call it Repetition for the sake of a handy little acronym to help us remember how to design a document, but we really mean consistency.

A Load of CRAP: Contrast

This is now one of three classes I've had where the CRAP principles have come up. You'd think I'd be able to remember what the letters stand for by now. I mean, I can usually remember them eventually, but not in order. The annoying thing about CRAP is that it's stuff that should really be intuitive. And the ironic thing is that CRAP is what you use so your document doesn't look like crap.

I'm going to take the letters one by one, one post at a time.

C is for cookie. That's good enough for me.

Except that this isn't Sesame Street (unfortunately.) C is actually for contrast. It means that the different parts of your document should look different. Headings shouldn't be the same as sub-headings, and sub-headings shouldn't be the same as body text. Sounds pretty simple, right?

I'd like to think that most people know to make headings and body text look different. I could be wrong about that, but hey, I'm an optimist. The whole point of headings and sub-headings is to help readers navigate the text. They're like road signs. "If you're headed for Chicago, take the next exit!" "If you're looking for what supplies you need for this project, read this paragraph!" Could you imagine if the road signs looked exactly the same as the road? No one would ever notice them! The GPS would tell you to turn left on Willow Road, but you wouldn't know which road was Willow Road, and pretty soon the GPS is doing nothing but scolding you with the word "Recalculating," which tends to sound very condescending in an automated British accent.

That's why road signs need to stand out, and headings and sub-headings, as the road signs of documents, need to stand out. So you make them contrast with the rest of the text.

The trouble, I think, comes from distinguishing the title from the headings and the headings from the sub-headings. These are different levels of road signs. Some things need to stick out more than others. "No parking 4 am to 6 am" doesn't need to stand out quite as much as "STOP." Likewise, the title should probably be the most prominent text on the page, followed by headings, then sub-headings, and then the main text. Really, it's very simple.

Reading Response: "Graphic Design"

To be honest, I'm not really sure what the point of this reading was. It didn't tell me anything I didn't know. Actually, I'm not sure it told me much of anything at all. It was all about diagrams, which really means it was almost all diagrams with a little bit of text that said, "These are diagrams!" Naw, really? Remind me why I paid so much for this book to read one chapter with almost no information in it at all.

I probably shouldn't be so bitter. I should say something intellectual. I just didn't find anything intellectually stimulating in the book.

This was assigned to correspond with the module when we made cultural maps, so maybe I'll talk about that instead. We had to make a map of our cultural influences. "Map" was a very loose term here, and I guess some of the stranger diagrams in this chapter were supposed to help tweak our imaginations on what a map could be. Since I'm obsessed with the Muppets, I wanted to make my map into a puppetry scene, with hand puppets and puppeteers for cultural influences. Then, since it's so complex, I would have puppets puppeteering puppets, and puppeteers puppeteering multiple puppets, and multiple puppeteers puppeteering single puppets (who of course would be puppeteering puppets that were also puppeteered by other puppets and so on and so forth and are you dizzy yet?). But the bottom line is, it was all just too complicated to draw with hand puppets.

So I used marionettes. Strings make everything easier... and more tangled.

Reading Response: "Practices of Looking" Chapter Seven

So here's the thing--capitalism rules our lives. Whether we mean to or not, we define who we are by what we buy and where we buy it and so on and so forth. I, for example, have purchased my way into the identity of not caring what's "cool" and just going with what fits, looks alright, and is reasonably priced. Yet I've also strayed from that identity by getting a bunch of Gap jeans over Winter break. So now my wallet (or my mom's wallet, really) says that maybe I do care about the label a bit, because $70 is kind of crazy for a pair of jeans, when really it's just that Gap happens to be the only store that sells jeans that fit me.

This is where I start having issues with "commodity culture" and "voting with your wallet" and things like that. There's this idea that you should only buy from a company if you agree with their ethics and want to support them in their endeavors, but practicality tends to get in the way. So no, I'm not particularly fond of what I've heard about Wal-Mart's ethics, but the fact of the matter is that they have low prices and I'm a broke college student with no job. So yes, I still shop at Wal-Mart, because if I don't, I won't be able to eat by the end of next year.

I distinctly remember chatting with a co-worker once who said that it bugged her when people wore "go green" shirts without thinking about the fact that those shirts were made by underpaid child labor. And I thought, how many ethical missions can you support at one time?

Really, if you want to live a green life without supporting the evil industries of the world in their exploitation of underprivileged workers, you have to grow all your own food and make all your own clothes--oh, but don't buy your fabric off the shelf, because that's mass-produced somewhere, too. Make your own fabric. And by the time you go that far, you're taking up so much land for farming and such that you're contributing to over-crowding the planet, because it's that much more space where other people can't live.

The more I learn about this sort of stuff, the more helpless I feel to it all. I just don't know where to find a balance between taking care of myself and taking care of the world, so I end up only taking care of myself. I mean, I try to recycle, but beyond that? I want to be ignorant, if only to avoid the guilt of doing nothing when I'm trapped by the big bad companies and my empty wallet.

Reading Response: "Practices of Looking" Chapter Four

Alright, so let's talk about the virtual.

The most condensed definition of "virtual" that I can wrangle out of this book kind of amuses me. It's that "virtual" is used to indicate phenomena that exist, but not in a tangible, physical way. Really, it's a very nice definition, but it incorporates more than the book really discusses. To me, that definition incorporates the sort of zaniness that goes on over at Muppet Central Forum or in some of my IM conversations, in which we throw penguins and shoot water guns at each other and one friend turns into an otter while I whack the other over the head with a frying pan. Of course, we're not really doing that stuff to each other, but we talk as if we are. The real difference between this stuff and what the book is talking about is that there aren't any images that go along with me whacking my friend over the head with a frying pan. Does that make it any less real, any less virtual? Well, no, I don't think so. What you see isn't everything. One of the moderators on the forum is legally blind. Images wouldn't do him much good, but since all of our interaction is through text, he can participate just as well as any of us. If you ask me, I think that makes it more real than, say, The Sims. (Of course I'm sure plenty of people could contest me on that... in fact, I could contest myself on that.)

That's one of the points of this class, though. "Visual Rhetoric," or "Visible Rhetoric," (I can never remember which one we're supposed to use) isn't just what you see; it's what you hear, smell, feel, and think. We talk about the viewer and the spectator and how no rhetorical experience is ever isolated from other rhetorical experiences, so really it's about all of your sensory perceptions plus your thoughts and memories. The sum total of all that is Visible Rhetoric.

Anyway, getting back to the virtual. It's actually one of the problems of my life. People seem to think I need a "real" social life, not realizing that I've got one; it's on my computer. Just because I know my friends almost exclusively through IM doesn't mean they're not real, or that my friendship with them isn't as real as my friendship with people I know in "real life." I just happen to know them through a virtual space. So it's not tangible, no, but it's still real. People don't get that. It's nice to see that the text book does... in its own, indirect little way.

Reading Response: "Practices of Looking" Chapter Three

Gaze is a really hard thing to understand. The definition in the back of the book is about as long as my last two posts. I might understand it a little better if this bug I've been fighting wasn't trying to rear its ugly head again. Note to self: procrastination may lead to trying to do a huge assignment all in one day when you are sick, when you could have just done it a little at a time when you were healthy.

Anyway, the real trouble is that gaze has been used to mean a whole bunch of different things in different contexts. First, there's the kind of gaze I'm most familiar with (as you probably are as well, Imaginary Reader), in which a gaze is a prolonged look that's usually accompanied by an adverb like "lovingly," "longingly," "tenderly," "fondly," or "sternly." That's easy enough. But of course that's not the kind of gaze we talk about in class.

In class, a gaze is not something you do, longingly or otherwise. It can, however, be something that you enter. Or something like that. This is the gaze I have the most trouble understanding. It has something to do with power relations... Actually, I think I might be lumping multiple kinds of gaze into one kind of gaze, which makes it even harder to understand.

Here's one gaze I do get: the male gaze. That's the gaze that looks at women as objects. That way of thinking about "gaze" can apparently be differentiated all sorts of ways. So there's the male gaze and the female gaze, but there's also the upper-class gaze and the middle-class gaze and the lower-class gaze, and all sorts of other gazes for things like race and... really, just about any category you can put people in has a gaze specific to it. But the one people seem to talk about most is the male gaze.

So now let me get back to that other gaze I don't quite get. Maybe rambling about it will help me understand. It has to do with feeling like you're being watched, whether you actually are or not. And when you feel like someone or something is watching you, that person has power over you. ...That actually seems to sum up most of it. Is it really that simple? Because if it is, then textbooks really need to learn how to use some clearer language.

Reading Response: "Practices of Looking" Introduction and Chapters One and Two

This was the first reading assigned of the semester, and I actually did most of it at the time. Then in class, the professor started using some of the terms defined in the reading, and it felt so good that I pretty much knew what she meant. You would think that would be encouragement enough to keep doing the reading, but the procrastinator in me took over. (I'm really painting myself as a bad student, aren't I? I'm really just chiding myself. I mean, come on... I know better! Shame on me.)

There really is some interesting stuff here, though--or at least, some important stuff. Interpellation, for example, is important. That's how an image, ore really how anything, calls out to each viewer as an individual. It's when a commercial on TV is aimed at YOU! Even though it's also aimed at every single person who happens to be watching that channel at that exact moment, you react like it's talking to YOU! Yes, YOU and only YOU! YOU really want a Reese's cup, don't you? YOU want to keep your clothes looking great by washing with Tide! YOU are hungry--and even if you're not, you will be by the end of this commercial break because there are so many ads for restaurants. Suddenly YOU are craving Arby's curly fries, so you and your roommate get in the car and go right now! (Obviously, it was a really lame show. Pity it's the middle of the night and Arby's is closed.) It's all because the ad was talking to YOU, and that's interpellation.

Now, the term that oddly caught my attention in this reading was bricolage, which seems a lot like appropriation, which seems to be the more important term. Bricolage (which I might just like because it's a fun word) is taking something out of its usual context and using it for something it wasn't intended to be used for, like turning a safety pin into a earring. Appropriation isn't quite as physical--it has more to do with changing the meaning of ideas, like a slogan or an image or something like that. When someone imitates the style of iPod ads for something completely unrelated to iPods, that's appropriation--and it gets extra points if it's some sort of social critique.

The First Post: A Little Rambling

Alright, so I set up this blog back in January for a class I'm taking this semester, and I haven't touched it since. Needless to say, that means I've fallen plenty behind, and now I need 22 posts ASAP if I want a decent grade.

The class is on Visible Rhetoric, so to kick things off, let's kick things off with a rhetorical analysis of this very blog post... as I write it.

Since acknowledging the flaws in your argument is supposed to be good for your ethos, let's say that the fact that I said straight out that I procrastinated and now have to cram to get a grade can make you, my (probably imaginary) readers, a little more sympathetic to me, the blogger. After all, who has never procrastinated? And who has never busted their butt doing something for a grade when, in the long run, the something they were busting their butt for probably wouldn't matter for anything beyond that grade?

Now there's something interesting I just did there. I said that this assignment only matters for the grade, and I sort of implied that the grade doesn't matter much either. That's not entirely true. As an Honors student, grades matter a lot to me, and I haven't taken very good care of them this semester, and now I'm concerned that I may lose my status in the Honors program.

See what I did there? I just sort of casually slipped in that I'm in the Honors program, which indicates to you that I'm smart, which makes me more credible. But I might lose that Honors status, which means I'm struggling, which brings us back to that sympathy thing. On the other hand, since I mentioned the Honors thing, you might now resent me for being one of those annoying smart kids. I do try not to be too annoying about it, but I am the kid who likes to sit at the front of the class, comes to class every single day, and tends to do pretty well on tests without studying for them. (Now, see, the fact that I've said all of that sort of undermines me not being annoying about it, doesn't it?)

My average post should probably be a bit longer than this, but I've gotta keep moving. I have reading to respond to.